iPad Bookmark Bar: How to Keep Your Favorite Websites in Easy Reach

With the release of iOS 7, this post has been updated, and can be found, here.

I enjoy using the Bookmark Bar feature as part of Safari on my computer, and I’ll admit I missed it for the first few months I had my iPad. I didn’t think that the feature was included, and so I worked around the loss, grumbling as I went.

However, I was completely wrong. The Bookmark Bar IS part of the iPad, I just didn’t know it. I’m delighted to have “found” it, and to share it with you.

The Bookmark Bar is very handy. Once you have it set up, whenever you go to Safari, you will see your favorite websites (ones that you have bookmarked) right across the top of the screen. Just touch one and you will be whisked right to the website.

So let’s set up the Bookmark Bar. We start by activating it in Settings.

Open Settings > Safari. Look for “Always Show Bookmarks Bar” and turn it “on”.

Close settings, and launch your Safari app. Go to a website that you visit frequently. Now, touch the sharing arrow up at the very top left of the page (it will be just to the right of the open book). A menu will drop down and one of the choices will be “Add Bookmark”. Touch “Add Bookmark” and then “Bookmarks Bar.” Finally, tap “SAVE”.

That’s all there is to it. The next time you launch Safari, look up at the top of the page, (just under the search boxes) and you will see the names of all the websites that you have added to the Bookmark Bar. Tap any of them to zap yourself straight to their website.

Like this:

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I had asked this question somewhere else on this site but I can’t find it. So I will ask it here.
What’s the diff between bookmarks and reading list? I assume you can use both when you are offline.
Thanks

I don’t know if I can be terribly helpful, but I’ll try. (This would be a good blog post topic for me to do in depth.) But for now… if you Bookmark, you are just saving your favorite websites so that they are handy to you. But in order to see them, you have to be able to get online. The Reading List now functions to save an article for off-line viewing, later. I have not used that much, because I use the app, Instapaper. But my understanding is that the Reading List should have that same off-line functionality. Hope this is a helpful start for you.🙂

In Settings > Safari I don’t see “Always Show Bookmarks Bar” .
However, when I launch Safari there are a couple websites I would like to remove.
How do I do that ? (Upgraded to iOS 7 a couple days ago.)
Thanks for any help !
Bob

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. iOS7 has brought MANY changes, and I’m sure that quite a few of my posts will need to be updated. I will write a new post about this topic as my very next post. Stay tuned!! 🙂

Since the update, the top of my page does not look like the example you show on this page. On the right side at top, in blue are pictures of open book, cloud, and a plus sign. I can open the bookmark, but following the iPads directions, the sites I try to put in bookmark go to “folders”. I cannot open these with a click.